Best Original Score

With Oscar nominations just around the corner, let’s take a look at one of the categories that, thankfully, never seems to spark the deranged passions of bloggers and columnists, half of which right are now are in the middle of deciding whether to canonize or burn Martin Scorsese.

Nothing helps the mind relax and the emotions flow like a good piece of music and in the case of movie music, which can be thrilling and evocative (Mud) or intrusive and distracting (Gravity), it can also help us define specific viewing experiences. How many of you were rolling your eyes at Hans Zimmer’s redundant score for Captain Phillips only to realize the score had been in fact written by Henry Jackman? And how many of you were flabbergasted at Zimmer’s ability to stop parodying himself and delivering one of the year’s lushest scores in the stunning 12 Years a Slave?

AMPAS’ music branch always works in its own peculiar ways (never discount John Williams who apparently scored The Book Thief in 2013), but we can dream about them nominating ingenious, groundbreaking scores, right? In the service of said wishful thinking here’s our FYC for Best Original Score (apologies to the sweeping work of Zimmer and Christophe Beck of Frozen who were runner-ups).

Paolo Sorrentino’s love-song to Rome was already so Felliniesque that to use music similar to Nino Rota’s would’ve been complete overkill, so he went the traditional way and had Lele Marchitelli concoct a score so sweeping and gorgeous that with each new note we feel we are watching something truly divine.

As the bandleader of Ima Robot and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Alex Ebert has proved to be one of the most inventive American musicians, but nothing in his work so far could’ve prepared us for the Vangelis-meets-Beethoven glory of the music for All is Lost. In a movie of very few words, his arrangements evoke the film’s endless melancholy as a single character fights hard to survive against the inclement, heartless force of nature.

While the disco beats were orgamsic, Arcade Fire's Reflektor wasn’t their best work this year. Creating the music for Spike Jonze’s lovely Her, the superband found themselves reaching new peaks of inventiveness. With the question of how to voice something who isn’t tangible, they created a soundtrack that evokes love and god, which seen, or rather heard, through their pieces might very well be the same thing.

No working composer has been creating music as “quotable” as Clint Mansell. His work with Darren Aronofsky is impeccable and to date he has only been nominated for a single Golden Globe Award and a Grammy. His layered, mischievous work in Stoker should’ve put him in more people’s ballots, if only because of the way he makes us see Matthew Goode’s character’s wicked smile with a single piano note.

Martinez had a banner year between this and his brilliant work in the unjustly maligned Only God Forgives. If AMPAS voters were more adventurous, this would go to the very top of their list given it’s perhaps the most zeitgeisty score of the year. Sure in decades to come they’d blush about nominating Skrillex for Oscars, but listening to how he and Martinez are able to sum up euphoria in tracks like “Bikinis and Big Booties Y’all” and “With You, Friends (Long Drive)”, it’s undeniable to say that no other music represented 2013 like theirs did.

White Hills epic '80s callback
Stop Mute Defeat is a determined march against encroaching imperial darkness; their eyes boring into the shadows for danger but they're aware that blinding lights can kill and distort truth. From "Overlord's" dark stomp casting nets for totalitarian warnings to "Attack Mode", which roars in with the tribal certainty that we can survive the madness if we keep our wits, the record is a true and timely win for Dave W. and Ego Sensation. Martin Bisi and the poster band's mysterious but relevant cool make a great team and deliver one of their least psych yet most mind destroying records to date. Much like the first time you heard Joy Division or early Pigface, for example, you'll experience being startled at first before becoming addicted to the band's unique microcosm of dystopia that is simultaneously corrupting and seducing your ears. - Morgan Y. Evans

The year in song reflected the state of the world around us. Here are the 70 songs that spoke to us this year.

70. The Horrors - "Machine"

On their fifth album V, the Horrors expand on the bright, psychedelic territory they explored with Luminous, anchoring the ten new tracks with retro synths and guitar fuzz freakouts. "Machine" is the delicious outlier and the most vitriolic cut on the record, with Faris Badwan belting out accusations to the song's subject, who may even be us. The concept of alienation is nothing new, but here the Brits incorporate a beautiful metaphor of an insect trapped in amber as an illustration of the human caught within modernity. Whether our trappings are technological, psychological, or something else entirely makes the statement all the more chilling. - Tristan Kneschke

"...when the history books get written about this era, they'll show that the music community recognized the potential impacts and were strong leaders." An interview with Kevin Erickson of Future of Music Coalition.

Last week, the musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, celebrated the fact that his album A Crow Looked at Me had been ranked #3 on the New York Times' Best of 2017 list. You might expect that high praise from the prestigious newspaper would result in a significant spike in album sales. In a tweet, Elverum divulged that since making the list, he'd sold…six. Six copies.

Under the lens of cultural and historical context, as well as understanding the reflective nature of popular culture, it's hard not to read this film as a cautionary tale about the limitations of isolationism.

I recently spoke to a class full of students about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Actually, I mentioned Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" by prefacing that I understood the likelihood that no one had read it. Fortunately, two students had, which brought mild temporary relief. In an effort to close the gap of understanding (perhaps more a canyon or uncanny valley) I made the popular quick comparison between Plato's often cited work and the Wachowski siblings' cinema spectacle, The Matrix. What I didn't anticipate in that moment was complete and utter dissociation observable in collective wide-eyed stares. Example by comparison lost. Not a single student in a class of undergraduates had partaken of The Matrix in all its Dystopic future shock and CGI kung fu technobabble philosophy. My muted response in that moment: Whoa!

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell at St. Mark's Church in New York City, 23 February 1977

Scholar Christopher Grobe crafts a series of individually satisfying case studies, then shows the strong threads between confessional poetry, performance art, and reality television, with stops along the way.

Tracing a thread from Robert Lowell to reality TV seems like an ominous task, and it is one that Christopher Grobe tackles by laying out several intertwining threads. The history of an idea, like confession, is only linear when we want to create a sensible structure, the "one damn thing after the next" that is the standing critique of creating historical accounts. The organization Grobe employs helps sensemaking.